Craig Nova discusses The Informer with Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW’s Bookworm.  Listen to the interview here.

Craig Nova has written a frightening novel about corruption in pre-Nazi Berlin. Especially frightening is Nova’s perception that those times are so similar to ours. Nova speaks about how uses the sights, sounds and smells of the visceral world in the book, and the art of twisting a thriller into a parable.

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Stephen Amidon (author of the novel Security) reviewed The Informer in today’s Washington Post.  Amidon writes that Craig Nova, in The Informer,  ”…combines the virtues of serious literature with a gripping, thriller-like account of sexual and political treachery. His spare prose keeps the reader’s eyes locked on the story, even as it occasionally erupts into striking elegance.”

Click to read the Washington Post’s full review of Craig Nova’s The Informer.

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I always feel a little nervous when I read a book that claims to be a “literary thriller”. But in the case of  The Informer, literary means beautifully written, and thriller does mean tense and exciting along with plenty of action. Author Craig Nova has succeeded on a number of levels; firstly you can smell the cigars, sausage and perfumes of Weimar Berlin as he brilliantly captures the taut atmosphere of fear and decay in the city. Secondly he has created in Gaelle and Armina two strong contrasting female characters that readers will care about, and will turn the pages to find out their fate. The story is also full of interesting male characters: Felix, Bruno Hauptmann, Armina’s boss the devious Ritter, her boyfriend the botanist Rainier, Mani Carlson and Karl. Thirdly you get a love story in which a man and a woman communicate with shared little gifts in stark contrast to the brutality all around them. All these lives are cleverly interwoven to produce a complex story, which has a warning for us today.

Read the full review here.

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Michael M. Thomas, author of Love and Money, reviews The Informer in today’s edition of Head Butler.  Thomas writes:

As someone artfully conditioned by Eric Ambler and Philip Kerr and Alan Furst, I happen to be well-disposed toward novels dealing with the secret policeman’s Europe of the 1930s. But they have to get it right. It is not simply a matter of assembling a bunch of old Baedekers and street maps and railway schedules, or of cribbing nonfiction and academic research dealing with the period: art is required. An alternative reality that feels real must be brought into being. Craig Nova is one of those lucky writers gifted with the artistry necessary to pull this off. In “The Informer,” he gets it right.  

Read the full review at Head Butler

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Katherine Powers reviews The Infomer in The Boston Globe.  Powers describes the Berlin of 1919 to 1933 as “louche and violent, a world of hectic gaiety, anomie, and shabby expedience…an arena for the investigations and bleak soul-searchings of good-guy detectives.”  Among the likes of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther and Jonathan Rabb’s Nikolai Hoffner, she adds Armina Treffen of Craig Nova’s The Informer.   She says of The Informer:

The novel has plenty of suspense, an excellent plot, convincing characters, and a couple of knockout revelations, but it is its ambience that makes it the best contribution to fictional Weimar I’ve come across in a long time.

Click to read the full review.

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Craig Nova joins Frank Stasio on WUNC’s The State of Things to talk about The Informer and share why he thinks the Weimar Republic is not so dissimilar from our modern society.

Click to listen to Craig Nova on WUNC’s The State of Things

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Today’s Fringe blog features a Q&A about The Informer.  Read the entire interivew on the Fring blog.

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Dorman T. Shindler reviews The Informer in today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  Shindler writes:

Those in search of satisfying suspense and mystery will find it in “The Informer.” Just as importantly, they will find a portrait of a society at loose ends, and people who longer feel in control of their own lives….Once again, Craig Nova proves that his writing can be just as moving, just as entertaining and insightful, as that of the finest writers in anyone’s literary canon. “The Informer” is a timely and haunting political thriller.

Click to read the full review.

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Carol Hoenig, author of the multi-award-winning novel Without Grace, discusses the influence of George Orwell on Craig Nova’s new novel, The Informer in today’s Huffington Post.   She writes:

Similar to what is happening across our country, Nova takes what happened in Berlin, starting in 1930, and brings to life a cast of characters–some honest and wanting nothing more than to be loved, others violent and distrustful while all are affected by the Weimar Republic. There’s a certain mood that runs through this novel–a noir-like mood shaped by notable writing, bringing the reader into a dangerous place….

Read the article on The Huffington Post.

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Today in The Daily Beast, bestselling author John Irving says you have to read The Informer. He speaks to Craig Nova about his new espionage novel set in 1930s Berlin—and their long friendship.

Irving writes:

Many years ago, I reviewed Craig Nova’s The Good Son for The New York Times Book Review, which led to a correspondence, and our friendship, which continues to this day. I wrote that the novel “has characters of great, outward bravery and of heartbreaking inner need”; I said that his characters were “as vivid with suffering and with spirit as recurring dreams.” Well, that hasn’t changed, but I might have also noticed—as I do now—that Nova’s characters are not easy to like; yet, in novel after novel, he made the most unlikely characters sympathetic—and, especially lately, he’s often put them on a collision course. Maybe this first and most forcefully got my attention in Tornado Alley but it continues.

Continue reading the full interview at The Daily Beast and then take John Irving’s advice to read The Informer

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